23/02/2022 - BERLINALE 2022: We caught up with the French director to get the low-down on his newest archive-footage essay, which comes ten years after his Poussières d’Amérique

(© Cécile Burban)

Ten years after his deep dive into the rich iconography of the USA, its amateur-shot video documentation and its historicisation, director Arnaud des Pallières returns with another archive essay. From the dust of America in Poussières d’Amérique, he now turns his attention to an American Journal [+see also:
film review
interview: Arnaud des Pallières
film profile]. Inspired by the writings of famous thinkers and authors, he takes a trip across the country not just in a geographical sense, but also a temporal one – from early childhood impressions to the devastation of war. The movie had its premiere in the Encounters section of the Berlinale. We caught up with des Pallières via an online meeting.

Cineuropa: American Journal is a spiritual sequel to Poussières d’Amérique. Did the starting point come from having left-over archive footage, or did you start from scratch? And how did you decide on the focus?
Arnaud des Pallières: I wanted to try the journaling experience – ongoing montage, all improvised. I wanted to sit every morning at the editing table, without knowing what we were going to put in there... and just let it happen. We never do that in the cinema; we cannot afford to improvise, to be mistaken or to fail, because a film is expensive to make. In our case, it was not really a question of making a film; it was just a matter of seeing what a journal edited from the archives would look like. Not a diary, though. I did not want to account for my actions and gestures, or my moods. I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular. The images, the sounds and the fragments of text came together at my fingertips. A character appeared, and I followed him as far as I could. After a while, the producer said it was a movie.

You are the director and the editor, but the footage isn’t yours. As you say yourself, “The film is mine and not mine.” Are the aforementioned titles something you would apply to yourself, or would you use a completely different description of yourself in this case?
Who speaks in the film? The director? The narrator? The character? I do not know. It is a mystery, I believe, and I hope that is one of the charms of the movie. Can we claim, when we make a film from archive footage, that the film is “ours”? Isn't there illegitimacy in claiming to be its author? But come to think of it, no less so than any other film. In a documentary, one cannot claim to be the “author” of the events that one films, since one seizes what is offered to the camera. Even in fiction, the images and sounds are the product of the work of operators.

The same also goes for the sentence: “It is my childhood and it is not my childhood.” It is almost impossible for any adult to make the connection between who he is today and who he was as a child. We are nowhere close to who we were as children. Thus the archival film allows us to access one of the most essential mysteries of being and how any cinematographic form tries to account for it.

You use fish a lot as a reference to some obtainable knowledge, and as a synonym for children and men. What is the special symbolism of fish?
There is certainly a lot to be said about the symbolism of fish, the sea and fishing in many cultures, through literature and the arts in general. But here, it just so happens that filming oneself catching fish was one of the favourite activities of 20th-century Americans. Some of these images of the sea, of fishing, brought back some stories that I gleaned here and there during my readings, and the fish became a motif that runs through almost the entire film.

It took you ten years to finish work on Poussières d’Amérique. How long did you work on American Journal for?
Ten years and ten weeks. It took me ten weeks to produce American Journal. But that’s based on the material that I have been collecting over all these years and that had already allowed me to develop my two previous archival films: Diane Wellington [short film, 2010] and Poussières d'Amérique [feature film, 2011].